From: "Geo" 

"John Beckett"  wrote in
message news:00d7r01cpta61tlkk763islqdfom4b3c4d{at}4ax.com...

> You should take the time to understand my earlier post because it
> contains standard C procedures that must be mastered.

I was more concerned with first getting something to actually compile, then
I can play with changing it and learning . I mean there is so much
stuff you guys are posting for me to learn that I have to take it in steps.
Especially since I'm just doing this 10 minutes at a time.


> I did not use
> itoa but instead performed the dirty trick of adding 48 to convert a
> digit to an ascii character.

Yes but then I don't learn how itoa works. First I wanted to understand
that then I'll go back and try the other ideas. I saved all the posts from
this thread.

> Paul was too polite to point out that my code is straight out of the
> Ark. His posts show proper procedures, but from your stated aims, you
> need to master the basic C skills, even if they are ugly.

There is another difference here too. I'm used to learning a programming
language out of order. By that I mean I usually learn a language by taking
apart programs, learning to read it before I learn to write it. So I tend
to pick up the most used techniques first, but in this case I'm taking a
class so I'm trying to learn in the order teached yet I still find myself
jumping 4 chapters ahead to pick up some simple function like itoa because
I need that for the simple program I'm playing around with. The program
examples in the book are just boooooooorrrrrrring..

> Another point, probably unimportant. You could extract the three
> digits that you want from one call to rand, as below:
>   int n = rand();
>   itoa((n%10),a,10);
>   itoa(((n/10)%10),b,10);
>   itoa(((n/100)%10),c,10);

See? Now that's the kind of stuff they never show you in a programming
book. Now I'm going to have to do a whole new program just to play around
with this and see exactly what it's doing so I can build my mental image.
 That's really slick, it allows me to extract just one digit
out of a number so if n=4581 then c ends up being the 5. Very handy
technique, that was probably more useful than learning about itoa.

Geo.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5